Microsoft recently released the public beta of Windows 7 and given my inability to resist trying new (free) software, I bit the bullet and gave it a shot. Here are my thoughts thus far:

Fresh Install is faster
By this point I consider myself a veteran XP installer, mostly because of voluntary formats. Operating system installations (not just Windows) usually take a while, but this one was relatively fast — right around the 10 minute mark, as opposed to the usual 20 or 30.

Windows Update is just as slow
I’m not sure if this is something Microsoft is trying to improve in this iteration, but Windows Update is as slow as ever. Installing optional drivers took almost as long as the OS install. On a more positive note Update was very good about finding drivers for my monitor, network card, and sound card.

Anti-virus and Windows Defender
The first thing I was asked to do after installing and updating Windows was to find an anti-virus program. A link was provided to a Microsoft page with a list of supported programs. While the lists for each Windows OS is incomplete (my current favorite, avast!, is missing) there were several options listed. I opted for Kaspersky, and the installation and subsequent scan was painless; Windows was very quick to recognize that I had installed an anti-virus program and also when the program had been updated.

The suggested Windows Defender scan was surprisingly quick — even though it’s a fresh install and there aren’t many files on the system yet, it still seemed faster than a scan on Vista.

Desktop Personalization
The dreaded gadget bar seems to be hidden by default. Windows 7 includes some pre-packaged “Windows Themes” that apply quickly and are fun to use — some include multiple backgrounds, so if you get sick of looking at one of the backgrounds in the “Landscape” theme you can right-click on the desktop and choose “Next Desktop Background Picture” from the context menu.

Windows 7 - Next Desktop Background Picture

Paint
Paint has been greatly improved, now offering things like cropping and even free-form selections. Equally impressive is that the default format when saving was PNG. All of the screenshots in this post were edited with Paint.

Taskbar
I thought it would take longer to get used to the new taskbar, but the transition has been less painful than expected. It does seem to take a little longer to identify programs due to the lack of a text description, but at the same time this provides more room. I thought I might not like the extra space the new taskbar occupies, but it’s really not that much larger and still smaller than your average OS X dock.

System Tray
The system tray (or “Notification Area” as it’s called in the Control Panel) sports a very sharp redesign with simple and attractive system icons:

Windows 7 - System Tray

There are also some nice customization features available, including the ability to hide an an icon’s notifications and being able to turn off system icons.

“Snap To”
A really nice feature is the ability to “snap” an open window to either the left or right side of the screen. This makes it easy to compare two documents or websites by having each of them take up half of the screen. In a related feature you can drag a window to the very top of the screen to maximize it. Each of these actions comes with a nice window-outline animation that shows what will happen when you release the mouse button, and the window will return to its original size when it is dragged away from the screen edge.

Conclusion
I honestly didn’t expect my first impression to be so positive (or to be using the words “quick” and “fast” so often!), but I must say that Microsoft has pleasantly surprised me. I came in expecting to see a lot of ideas stolen from Apple, but there are a lot of original concepts that are actually intuitive and fun. Assuming Microsoft can continue to make improvements and stop itself from making any major bad code and design decisions this might actually be a decent operating system. I’d be happy to finally ween my PC off of the now very dated Windows XP and move to something more modern — let’s just hope it doesn’t turn into another Vista.